In one of the most poignant vox pops I ever did, I wasn’t even looking for Neets, AKA young people who aren’t in education, employment or training. I was just looking for people on the streets near Liverpool with enough time to speak to me. I ran into a young man who had dropped out of university, and he explained why: he’d been doing a business studies degree, and had realised during his second term that a degree didn’t make sound business sense. Everything he was learning, he could have found in a book, and the nine grand of annual fees was only a fraction of the total debt he was incurring. He went on to tell me quite a lot about upfront cost and hidden cost, and ratios and leverage, but the bottom line was that it didn’t represent value for money.
So he left, but that gave him three problems: first, he still had a load of debt, just nothing to show for it; second, he had nothing to do; third, a lot of the value of a degree cannot be counted – you only begin to comprehend it by its absence.
